Some people tend to forget just what a powerful tool email still still is in this day and age of social networks. I have even heard some people say “I don’t do email, you have to get my Facebook.” Well, yes, that may work for some people, but us “old dogs” also know that Facebook isn’t going to download in to Outlook or Thunderbird where we have better control over our responses and image.

All that being said, hopefully you are collecting email addresses from customers and clients as you go through the day, and it’s a great way to get the word out about your profiles. Nothing beats a good email burst to tell them about an exciting exclusive offer for your friends on MySpace. (in turn growing your viral marketing team without them realizing it) How about letting them know about your new Facebook Page so when they add you, you get that Social Ad mojo working?

Managing an email list can be difficult work though, and that’s why you need to look in to places like Constant Contact. And best of all, not only can you just announce stuff, you can do surveys also. “What social network would you like to see us on?” “Would you like us to build an OpenSocial application?” and so on.

Just because email is “old school” doesn’t mean it’s not still a vital tool to your marketing, both social and non-social.

Facebook Pages may have eased advertising a bit too much, it seems.

We talked the other day about how Facebook Pages made it so easy for you start running ads on the popular network, but it may have gone too far. Thus far, the only ads I have encountered are for dating sites and what appear to be scams. (”Get free unreleased video games!”)

I guess everyone should have expected this to happen, and it will sadly lessen the impact of any ads you may want to run as people will quickly start ignoring them. While any business as a right to advertise themselves, it seems unfortunate that these types are so quickly clogging up all the ad venues on the web, making it more difficult for you to get your message out.

It’s probably still worth a try in these early days, but who knows how long this will be effective.

Janet Meiners over at Marketing Pilgrim wrote up Bebo’s platform release, and she brought up a point that sounded so oddly familiar…

When anyone says social networking profile I can’t help myself but translate that into free publicity for me and my company (or clients). I’ve been asked how I do my reputation management online, and there’s one of my secrets. It doesn’t take long to create profiles of yourself everywhere and focus on a few social networking sites that are worth a deeper time investment. Because they are time investments. But they are also ways to get links and exposure online.

Ms. Meiners is 100% correct, of course, if nothing else you need to set up some form of presence on all of the networks. This will increase your organic search traffic, raise brand/company awareness, and give you potentially some new customers.

You will quickly get a feel for which networks are doing the best for you, and those are the ones where you will invest the most time. As long as you stop by the smaller networks once or twice a week to check for messages, they can maintain themselves, but the more popular ones you’ll want to check at least once a day.

Isn’t it about time you got started on this?

You would have thought that the announcement of Open Social would have brought an end to all the social networks announcing their own development platforms, but, apparently it wasn’t.

News has come out that Bebo, a UK based social network, will announce their own network on Tuesday.

So, why does this matter to you and your social marketing? This is just a further fracturing of the social networking infrastructure. Will developers bother to spend time working on applications for properitry systems when they can kill so many birds with one stone by working under Open Social? Only time will tell, but it seems fairly unlikely that the Bebo platform will receive much love.

It will be up to you if less social networks for you to run accounts on will be a good or bad thing for you, but we could see movement off of networks that choose to go it on their own for platforms.

With the addition of the Facebook Pages we talked about the other day, they’ve also eased adding advertising to the site. Once you’ve got your page set up, you also can easily start a cost per click (CPC) advertising campaign to the users of Facebook.

It’s similar to Google Ads in that is a simple text ad, but you can also add a small graphic if you like. One nice feature is as you add each keyword, it tells you how many potential users you are targeting. With just six keywords, I was targeting well over 100,000 users interested in my business. Now, you do also pay for impressions, but you can bid as low as $.15 per 1,000 impressions, and clicks you can bid as low as $.01. You can also set a budget as low as $5.00 a day, keeping your budget well under control.

The drawbacks are that you can’t see, that I could find, how your bids stand up against others, and reporting is delayed by as much as 48 hours. It will make it a bit difficult to react to changes, but if you are cautious with your bidding, that shouldn’t be much of a worry.

Is it a good idea to advertise in such a closed environment? Only time will tell, but with budgets this low, you can sure give it a shot and see what happens.

When you get on the social networks you’ll quickly notice one thing; they all look the same. Everyone’s profile looks the same when they start off, and it’s fairly boring. There are sites out there where you can work on editing your look, but they all tend to be pretty basic changes, and not all that professional looking.

MySpace, for instance, can actually handle fairly elaborate looking pages as it’s all handled by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but it is a mater of knowing how to do the work that is the problem. So if you want to stand out from the crowd, and you don’t have the time, nor patience, to master CSS, what can you do? Well, you can hope you can find someone to do it for you, or just have a stale looking page. With the wealth of information on the web though, there’s no reason to do that when there are sites like GetAFreelancer.com.

The beauty of this site is you post what you need done, and then you let the freelancers bid on the job. So while you’re spending money, you can get some pretty fairly low bids, hopefully saving you some money. And, in case you’re wondering, as freelancers do jobs, they get rated, so you can choose either by money or how highly recommended they come.

The idea, no matter what, is to make yourself stand out from the rest of the pack.

Have you been reading this blog and thinking “You know, this all sounds wonderful, and I know how you promote that networking is free, but I just don’t have the time!”?

It’s understandable, and with the overload of information the normal person processes in a day now, your “free” time is dwindling faster and faster. So much for technology making our lives easier, huh?

So, all that said, you still want to take advantage of this great boon to the business world known as “social marketing”. That’s when you turn to someone who offers Social Marketing Services. True, social networking and marketing can be free, but when you have a million other things begging for your attention, it is sometimes more cost effective to hire someone to do the “dirty work” for you.

Why don’t you drop us a line, and see if there isn’t someway we can help you out?

Very interesting article I stumbled across yesterday. It broke down all the aspects of advertising on a social network, and didn’t paint a very rosy picture:

[via Mashable] Facebook and MySpace have created decent offerings that leverage their best assets. But in my opinion, the challenges that social networks present as an advertising medium are likely to lead to disappointment for marketers who expect that social networks can become significant drivers for commerce. This does not mean that marketers will not spend money in this space. To the contrary, many continually spend in areas that don’t deliver results. If you’ve had the opportunity to talk frankly with interactive brand marketers, for instance, most will probably tell you that the CPM advertising model rarely delivers good results. Yet CPM lives on and they continue to do deals. It’s simply part of the “marketing mix.”

I say that you shouldn’t get discouraged. Everything we discuss here is based on letting things grow organically with as little effort as possible on your part, and also as little investment. If you want to pour money in to your social marketing, then, by all means, go ahead, but why not let it be what the name implies? Let the social aspect of it all spread the word for you.

As I’ve discussed before, have contests, form street teams, but whatever you do, let the “social graph” carry you through.

As there always seems to be a new social network popping up for just about everything nowadays (Kylie Konnect, anyone?), now there is one tailored for learning how to market on them.

Gooruze.com is a social network who want to understand social marketing. Ask questions, write articles, read articles, connect with others… whatever you may want to do. Will it be the be-all, end-all for social marketing resources? Doubtful. But, it may teach you a few things you didn’t know, or give you a good tip.

My whole theory has always been to learn from others mistakes. Why should we all have to repeat the same missteps over-and-over, and if someone is willing to share their faux pas’ with you, then you might as well listen. You never know, you could tweak their mistakes and make it your own success.

For quite a while I’ve been saying that Facebook was essential to your social marketing, but not that friendly to businesses. Well, all of that changed today.

Facebook has now introduced what it has dubbed “Facebook Pages”, which is built specifically for businesses to build a presence on the social network. You can build it for your brand, business, or even for bands. The reason this will be helpful to you is that if a user chooses to show their interaction with you in their mini feeds, people will see what businesses their friends are interacting with, spreading your name virally through out the site.

As with any other Facebook accounts, you will be able to add applications, but just make sure not to go too wild with them. You want people to concentrate on you, not your pretty bells & whistles.

Start getting those pages set up every one, you just got millions of new customers!

For the past two days we’ve discussed how to search the web for information that might damage your online reputation. Now the question is what do you do if you find something?

Has the person, or organization, made valid points? If not, ask them, nicely, to make corrections. If they do have valid points, you need to address them in a calm and professional matter. Sometimes just showing you care enough to address the situation will go a long way to calming a situation down. Most people view all companies, no matter what their size, as uncaring, unfeeling monolithic entities, the mere fact you will show concern will usually help matters.

The most essential key is to listen. No matter how right you may think you are, you can sometimes be blinded by being too close to a situation, and there may be an angle you did not think of when coming up with your policies. It never hurts to hear an outsider’s point of view when it has upset them enough to act out.

At worst, they’ll stay angry, and it will be hard for them to do more damage then they’ve already done. In most cases the person will calm down and post something thanking you for attentiveness, so even if you don’t come to a total conclusion, you will at least showed you cared enough to react.

The absolute last line of defense should be replying in your own company blog. possibly escalating the situation to where people perceive you as picking on the complainer. This can be the worst possible outcome to any situation as it could motivate more people to posting more negatives about you.

Just always remember to keep calm, though it can be difficult to do when it seems some one is attacking your company.

This is the second part of three about controlling your online reputation management. Yesterday we covered how to watch the search engines for large mentions of your company, brand, yourself, and executives, but you also need to watch the blogosphere.

Searches of Technorati, BlogPulse, Feedster and more will sometimes amaze you with what you will find about yourself, or your company. Once you have done these searches, you can also set up RSS feeds to deliver results to your favorite reader. It also wouldn’t hurt to check sites such as Keotags to see if people are tagging their blog articles with anything related to your organization.

It almost goes without saying, but you of course also need to monitor news aggregators such as Yahoo and Google news. While these sites focus mainly on major news outlets, they do also bring news from many smaller sources together. Quite often what might seem like an innocuous news story in a small time paper, can get blown up to something much bigger when a large news company gets a hold of it. So monitoring all the news streams is always helpful.

Tomorrow we will wrap up the series on reputation management with suggestions on how to handle bad publicity when it does pop up.

Something I hear a lot is “How do I keep an eye on my reputation?” There is a simple solution in the form of “alerts”.

Both Google and Yahoo provide alert systems, and while this won’t cover everything, it will certainly give you a start. For Google, simply go to their alerts page, enter the terms you want it to search for, how often you want it done, and where you want the results emailed to. Yahoo is a bit more complicated to set up, but is worth the effort.

What do you want to monitor though? You need to cover the names of any executives in your company, your company name, any brand names, and essentially any thing that may be related to your company’s name and products/services.

These of course only cover search results, and there is more to the Internet nowadays, and we’ll be covering a few of those tomorrow along with how you react to negative comments on the web.

Yesterday I was talking about the new Open Social platform that would allow developers to create applications once to be used on several networks. One of the companies mentioned was Ning, one that not many people have heard of. The company provides people, and businesses, with the ability to start their own social networks, and with their being a part of the Open Social system, these networks could soon be as good as any large scale operation.

So, why should you start your own social network? Come up with a niche that hasn’t been filled, and it could become a great marketing tool for your company. Even if you’re in manufacturing, set something up for your vendors to talk to each other an it will build good will with everyone you work with.

Yes, there are other white label social networking solutions out there, but with Ning joining the Open Social movement, it’ll be hard to say “no” to them. There will be people developing apps for the platform, and due to Ning’s involvement, you will be able to use them. And, again, if you develop your own app, it could be used on your network, and all the other’s in the group.

Social networking could get very interesting very soon.

The official announcement came out today that several social networks are teaming up with Google for an open development platform. This is in answer to the cries of developers as they feared writing new apps for each development platform.

Called “Open Social”, this is a direct answer to the Facebook development platform that has caused a stir with it’s thousands of silly apps that have begun to clog people’s profiles. It is thought that Open Source will be a bit more serious due to some of the partners involved. Sites that have signed on include Engage.com, Friendster, Google, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. Essentially this is a way for everyone to share the same platform and not everyone having to invent their own wheel that won’t be compatible with everyone else.

So, how does this effect your life in the social networking world? Well, it can mean two things. First, you could just ignore it, or, you could see if there is some way you could leverage what your company does in to an application of your own. Mind you, it should be useful and not something silly, but you now could kill several birds with one very small stone. If you develop your app with Open Social, you then could have people on multiple networks all using it, and all of them promoting your company with very little work on your part.

As for what the app could be depends on what your company does, so it’s hard to give general ideas, but this is certainly something that anyone with an eye on social marketing needs to keep close tabs on for the foreseeable future.